James Levine, a researcher at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., has an intense interest in how much people move — and how much they don’t. He is a leader of an emerging field that some call inactivity studies, which has challenged long-held beliefs about human health and obesity.
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A weakness of traditional activity and obesity research is that it relies on self-reporting — people’s flawed recollections of how much they ate or exercised. But the participants in a series of studies that Dr. Levine did beginning in 2005 were assessed and wired up the way I was; they consumed all of their food in the lab for two months and were told not to exercise. With nary a snack nor workout left to chance, Dr. Levine was able to plumb the mysteries of a closed metabolic universe in which every calorie, consumed as food or expended for energy, could be accounted for.

His initial question — which he first posed in a 1999 study — was simple: Why do some people who consume the same amount of food as others gain more weight? After assessing how much food each of his subjects needed to maintain their current weight, Dr. Levine then began to ply them with an extra 1,000 calories per day. Sure enough, some of his subjects packed on the pounds, while others gained little to no weight.

“We measured everything, thinking we were going to find some magic metabolic factor that would explain why some people didn’t gain weight,” explains Dr. Michael Jensen, a Mayo Clinic researcher who collaborated with Dr. Levine on the studies. But that wasn’t the case. Then six years later, with the help of the motion-tracking underwear, they discovered the answer. “The people who didn’t gain weight were unconsciously moving around more,” Dr. Jensen says. They hadn’t started exercising more — that was prohibited by the study. Their bodies simply responded naturally by making more little movements than they had before the overfeeding began, like taking the stairs, trotting down the hall to the office water cooler, bustling about with chores at home or simply fidgeting. On average, the subjects who gained weight sat two hours more per day than those who hadn’t.
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This is your body on chairs: Electrical activity in the muscles drops — “the muscles go as silent as those of a dead horse,” Hamilton says — leading to a cascade of harmful metabolic effects. Your calorie-burning rate immediately plunges to about one per minute, a third of what it would be if you got up and walked. Insulin effectiveness drops within a single day, and the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes rises. So does the risk of being obese. The enzymes responsible for breaking down lipids and triglycerides — for “vacuuming up fat out of the bloodstream,” as Hamilton puts it — plunge, which in turn causes the levels of good (HDL) cholesterol to fall.

This is the same Dr. Levine that invented the treadmill desk. Now that I've been reading up on this subject, maybe it's time to set up the computer workstation as a standing desk. I did it at work for a few months about three years ago, but had trouble with edema of the lower extremities - my feet swelled up. I've been sitting since. I'm gonna die.

My sister and her husband have lately taken to wearing these little Fitbit accelerometer doodads that measure daily activity and upload it to your computer, just to see how much beneficial motion takes place over the course of a day. They said it can vary by a factor of about five from day to day, but measuring it has gotten them to be more active in general._________________The reward for a good life is a good life.

Oh shit. I'm sitting right now. I'M GOING TO DIE SOMEBODY HELP ME_________________Ironically, Halen's one of the few people here I wouldn't worry about terrifying my friends and family. In my head he ends every real life conversation stroking his chin and saying, "well yes, that sounds reasonable."

doing a handstand. it's the only way to get your chakras aligned._________________Once, at a local NOW meeting where I was the only male among about a dozen women, a feminism trivia contest was held. I came in third.

I know someone who's mother had a stroke from sitting. She developed blood clots from sitting too much (I think she worked in an accounting office or did accounting for a business)._________________...if a single leaf holds the eye, it will be as if the remaining leaves were not there.http://about.me/omardrake

I know someone who's mother had a stroke from sitting. She developed blood clots from sitting too much (I think she worked in an accounting office or did accounting for a business).

My father's suffered a series of pulmonary embolisms due to disability inhibiting his ability to get any form of exercise. Being sedentary'll kill ya._________________There is a luxury to self-reproach.

In Japan I learned the legend that the little egg-shaped Daruma doll represents a bodhidarma that sat meditating so long his legs shrivelled up and perhaps fell off, but apparently it's not true.

I'm not even sure in what sense it's not true - it's not true that it's a legend, it's not true that the dolls are legless, or it's not true that it actually happened to somebody - but the web site says it's not true so let's leave it at that. It's not true._________________The reward for a good life is a good life.

i read/heard something like this somewhere else - something to the effect that sitting eight hours a day had deleterious effects, even if you got lots of exercise outside of work.

and here i thought having a job with low stress levels would keep my work from killing me.

what i'm considering is getting one of those big exercise balls to sit on (although i'm not sure how that will fly in the office). i think i should at least do it at home, though - apparently, you shift around on those enough to maintain your balance that it actually does have an effect (and no swollen legs from standing all day)._________________aka: neverscared!